One thing that’s pissed me off in the wake of the Live Earth concerts are groups like PETA piggybacking on this, and trying to use the event (once again) as a platform for us to all go super veggie. While I’m not going to even try and argue the logic that raising animals is a tax on the environment, I want to say the following:
First, it’s utterly pompous for them to make this claim:
The organizers of the Live Earth concerts list “green your diet” as one of the solutions to the environmental crisis, but we want people to know that it can be the solution.
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot? The solution? More than getting off our addiction to fossil fuels, setting up strict laws regarding pollution and hazardous chemicals, and other things of that nature? Sorry, but cutting meat out of your diet won’t suddenly make the environment magically better.
Secondly, and more importantly, I wanted to point this out. We humans are omnivores. That means we eat both meat and plant foods. There’s a really good reason for this. For as amazing of a bio-mechanical machine that the human body is, it lacks the ability to synthesize a wide range of essential vitamins, minerals, and other building blocks essential to keep the machine running in an optimal state. This includes proteins and amino acids that we need for building muscle and other essential tissues. While we can get some of these from the plants and other things we eat, we need to get a lot of those proteins from meat. It’s just a fact of human biology.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t more closely moderate what kinds of meat we eat and choose healthier choices. Those are important things for overall health. That’s important. It’s just that it really pisses me off when people like PETA try to get into an issue and take it over as their own.
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